August 31, 2012 by mhasegawa

Eastwooding

No, I don’t tweet. Sometimes I think it might be fun to do, but I don’t think fast enough to be clever. But to save some time for people, I have complied some of the best tweets about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair rant/ramble last night at the Republican convention. I was inspired by an article posted this afternoon on the Nation by Ilyse Hogue, Anatomy of a meme

Surprise guest, Eastwood, was reportedly given three minutes to speak, but spent the better part of fifteen minutes of prime time coverage ranting at an empty chair that was supposed to be an invisible President Obama. Pain was visible on the faces of candidate and campaign operative alike as it became clear that these confused ravings of the famous octogenarian were going to be the stand out performance from an otherwise carefully orchestrated week.

And that it is. Within moments of Eastwood’s start, @InvisibleObama had a twitter account with a picture of an empty chair. By the end of the speech, the chair had almost 17,000 followers. It now has 48,000.

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Even the President got in the fun when his twitter account posted a picture of the back of the President sitting is his chair, with the tag line “This seat’s taken.”

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In my opinion, the most succinct and spot-on insight came from a Jamelle Bouie tweet, “”This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.”

And here are some more taken from Hogue’s article.

Zach Braff: Now all my chairs want to be interviewed too.

FastLaugh: Give Clint Eastwood a break… The RNC asked him to speak about ObamaCare and he thought they said ObamaChair…

Bob Newhart: I heard that Clint Eastwood was channeling me at the RNC. My lawyers and I are drafting our lawsuit…

Josh Rogin

This from Andrew Sullivan’s blog

Screen shot 2012-08-30 at 10.31.30 PM

And Jed Lewison at the Daily Kos comments

Empty chair

Rumor has it that Mitt loved Clint’s empty chair routine so much that now he wants to do it in the Caymans

I wonder what surprise the Democrats have in store for us next week. Looking forward to it.

August 29, 2012 by mhasegawa

The National Debt and the GDP

Being a little behind in reading my email, I just saw this from Ezra Klein. He suggests you keep this in mind while you watch the Republicans try to push the debt onto the President and the Democrats.

Notice that you can barely see TARP. It is that dark blue streak that is separating the other two blue parts of the graph. Even the stimulus is pretty small.

The deficit is pretty easy to understand when you look at it in a graph. If you reduced the Bush tax cuts for income over &250,000 and worked on the costs of the wars – and didn’t start any new ones – you can really begin to reduce the debt. Maybe the huge number of people who think the tax breaks for the wealthy should be eliminated understand this better than Mitt and Paul and the rest of their gang. Certainly they understand this better than Grover Nordquist.

So when you are watching the Republicans in Tampa, remember this chart and thank Ezra Klein.

August 22, 2012 by mhasegawa

Obama and Women’s Healthcare

While I was working on the last post about Akin, Ryan etc., I ran across this great summary of what the Affordable Care Act does for women. In a column titled Obamacare(s) for Women, Katha Pollitt published in the Nation she provided this handy list of benefits.

Women will get a lot out of the Affordable Care Act. Here are just some of the ways:

1. As many as 10 million will get coverage in 2014 under Medicaid expansion, and by 2016, thanks to other provisions of the ACA, that number will grow to 13.5 million women.

2. By 2014, all plans sold to individuals will be required to cover maternity care. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 12 percent of those plans include that. Remember when Arizona’s Jon Kyl said he didn’t think his insurance should have to cover pregnancy and childbirth because he would never need it? The ACA destroys the mindset that care needed only by women is of no general concern.

3. More than 20 million women will get expanded coverage of preventive services—prenatal care, mammograms, pap smears, breast-feeding supplies, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, well woman checkups, immunizations, birth control and more.

4. Insurance companies will be barred from dropping women’s coverage when they become pregnant or sick.

5. Companies will be barred from denying coverage because of “pre-existing conditions,” like having had breast cancer, being pregnant (funny how that keeps coming up), having had a Caesarean or being the victim of domestic violence.

6. No more “gender rating”—charging women more for coverage just because they are women. This practice, already banned in some states but permitted in thirty-seven others, costs women a staggering $1 billion a year.

7. Older women will receive expanded preventive services through Medicare, like bone-density screenings for those at risk of osteoporosis.

8. The expansion of Medicaid will cover people who make up to 133 percent of the poverty line (about $31,000 a year for a family of four). True, enabled by the recent Supreme Court decision, at least eight red-state governors have said they will reject it. Let’s see how that works out for them.

9. The birth control provision is mammoth all by itself. Not only will it be costless to the patient; all methods must be covered. That means women will be able to choose the kind of birth control that works best for them, which means they are more likely to use it consistently. In particular, it means insurance must cover the most effective methods, including the IUD, which many plans exclude. At up to $1,000 upfront, it is too expensive for many women to shell out for, even though the IUD is one of the cheaper methods when you consider that it lasts for ten years or more. If anti-choicers really wanted to lower the number of abortions, they would be cheering this huge expansion of access to contraception. But no.

If Romney wins, women can wave goodbye to what Planned Parenthood has called “the single biggest advancement in women’s health in a generation.” Think about that next time someone tells you there’s no difference between the candidates. It’s just not true.

The President signs the Affordable Healthcare Act. Photo by AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

August 19, 2012 by mhasegawa

Why Obama may lose

OK. I’ve been a little out of sorts the last few days election=wise. I’ve been spending a little time working in one of Elizabeth Warren’s field offices making voter ID calls and doing data entry. It is going to be a close race with Scott Brown and every vote is going to count. And then I saw this in yesterday’s New York Times as part of Charles M. Blow’s column.

If you know any of these people tell them to register and/or to vote. There is still time. If even some of them vote, it will make a difference and if all of them do, it will be a landslide re-election for President Obama.

This is one of the reasons why Patrick McDonnell and Mutts have captured my mood perfectly

August 16th 2012 - Mutts

[From August 16th.]

Let’s get out there, find those voters and get them to the polls. Then maybe Crabby won’t have to be quite so crabby!

August 15, 2012 by mhasegawa

Joe Speaks

Yesterday Vice President Joe Biden got carried away and maybe used an unfortunate turn of phrase, but, as usual Joe spoke honestly and told the truth. And how do I know he told the truth? Just look at Mitt Romney’s reaction.

So what did Joe actually say? According to the Washington Post

Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

This set off a firestorm. Joe walked back the remark a little, but basically stood by what he said. Mitt Romney went a little nuts. (and, according to the Daily Kos, a scripted nuts since Mitt used a teleprompter). The New York Times put it this way

Standing in front of a stately town hall here in central Ohio, under a giant banner that read “Victory in Ohio,” Mr. Romney called Mr. Biden’s claim “another outrageous charge.”

“This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like,” he said.

In a personal dig that he wrote at the last minute Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Romney told the president to “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America.”

The Times also reported that the White House stood by the Biden remarks.

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (UNITED STATES)

Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe

Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012. Photograph by Shannon Stapleton.

So what are we to make of all this? The campaign is going to get very ugly. I think the Democrats are right to let Joe Biden be the attack dog and hopefully let President Obama be above the fray. But on a fundamental level, Joe Biden is right. The impact of the Republican proposals is on the poor even more that on the middle class. And the poor are still to a great extent people of color who understood what Joe was saying.

Jonathon Capehart put it this way in the Washington Post

So much for the selection of Paul Ryan as the veep nominee as the end of the petty bickering and the start of the campaign of “big ideas.” Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul claims that “President Obama’s campaign keeps sinking lower.” What was the offense? Vice President Biden said the word “chains.”

In tone and bite, Biden is to the Obama campaign what John Sununu is to the Romney campaign. Only the vice president is polished and likeable. Biden was speaking at a Virginia rally that the Associated Press reports “included hundreds of black people,” and he warned the assembled that Romney wanted to do away with the post-2008 regulations on Wall Street. “Unchain Wall Street,” Biden said. “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” Yeah, that was wince-worthy. It shall join all the others on the Biden blooper reel. But the high dudgeon of the Romney campaign is rather precious.

This is the campaign that seemed perfectly fine with Sununu saying he wished the president “would learn to be an American.”

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This is the campaign that has been mute in the face of Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) hyperbolic assertion that Obama would “rather you be his slave.”

This is the campaign that is allowing Newt Gingrich to host “Newt University” at the Tampa convention this month. The former House speaker is fond of calling Obama a “food stamp president.”A wicked phrase that has more racial baggage than a klansman’s El Camino.

This is the campaign of the candidate who uttered the equally racially fraught “if they want more stuff from government … more free stuff” when talking to supporters in Montana about what he told the NAACP about his desire to repeal Obamacare.

Let’s all be honest. This is a campaign about race. There is a black man in the White House. The Republican’s are fighting a last ditch battle to maintain a white majority in the United States electorate. We see this in the allegations of voter fraud and the purging of voter rolls. We see this in the audiences that surround Mitt and Paul Ryan. Yes, this is an election about economic policy and jobs, but the subtext is always race.

August 13, 2012 by mhasegawa

Paul Ryan’s Proposals in a Nutshell

The Boston Globe columnist, Scott Lehigh wrote what I think is one of the best summaries of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal compared to President Obama’s proposals. And whether Mitt Romney likes it or not, he is tied to the Ryan budget which he once described as “marvelous”.

Lehigh describes the Ryan budget this way

There will be a fierce fight to frame the argument, but Romney and Ryan will have a tougher challenge persuading the relatively small percentage of undecided voters. With Ryan as his running mate, Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans. To date, a lack of key details has made those proposals hard to analyze, which has obviously been intentional. Nor does the Republicans’ presumptive nominee want to be pinned to the details of Ryan’s Medicare plan, which would shift thousands in health care costs onto the backs of future generations of seniors; one of the talking points the campaign distributed to help Republicans discuss Ryan’s selection is that, as president, Romney will have his own Medicare proposal. But absent necessary details about Romney’s proposal, Ryan’s plan will and should stand as a fair campaign proxy.

Second, the reality is that you simply can’t accomplish what Romney and Ryan hope to — that is, a large, new across-the-board tax cut while tackling the long-term federal budget deficit — without hitting both middle-class and moderate earners. A recent analysis by the nonpartisan, well-regarded Tax Policy Center illustrated that very point. It showed that Romney’s vague assertion that he could pay for his new tax cut by closing loopholes and deductions, but without targeting those important to the middle class, was undoable. If Romney hews to his resolution to pay for his tax cut through loophole closings, the elimination of deductions would be so extensive that the average middle class family would see a tax hike, according to the center’s analysis.

Of course we already know that Romney considers the Tax Policy Center to be a Democratic front. The difference in approaches?

Now, with the baby boomers retiring and increasingly drawing on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the nation faces a large gap between future spending commitments and future revenues. But though tax cuts helped create the problem, Romney and Ryan insist it must all be solved through spending cuts. That flies in the face of several recent bipartisan deficit commissions, which have said that policy makers should rely on both spending cuts and new revenues.

President Obama, by contrast, wants tax breaks for upper earners to expire, which would mean more revenue, and thus lighter cuts in future spending. Because Obama wants to keeps the tax breaks for families making less than $250,000, substantial spending cuts will still be required, including reductions in entitlements. Obama has left many of those details for the future. But that failing is less egregious than Romney’s. Obama, after all, would recapture $750 billion or more (over 10 years) by ending the Bush tax cuts. And the president isn’t proposing a large new tax cut.

We can only hope that the Democrats can define Paul Ryan as successfully as they were able to define Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney will no longer be able to hide behind strategic ambiguity about his budget and tax cut plans with Paul Ryan as his running mate.

Photograph by SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS

May 12, 2012 by mhasegawa

Romney’s empathy or the lack thereof

I’ve been following closely the stories on the bullying incident at Cranbrook. I was, like many, horrified at the incident. But I was more horrified by the fact that no one at Cranbrook thought it necessary to discipline the young men involved. And I was most horrified by Mitt Romney’s nervous giggle when asked about the incident. I’ve been groping for an explanation of why he doesn’t remember what happened when the others involved remember it clearly. Then I read this very interesting article in the Boston Globe this morning. The story quoted a gentleman named Don Gorton.

While some observers have expressed doubt that anyone could forget such a dramatic episode, one activist who has studied bullying said he believes Romney may, in fact, have no recollection.

Teenagers who bully others often don’t remember the incidents because they weren’t traumatic for them, said Don Gorton, chairman of the Anti-Violence Project of Massachusetts, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce violence against gays and lesbians.

“Empathy is the critical variable,’’ Gorton said. “If they don’t feel their victims’ pain, the episode won’t stand out. It wasn’t a big deal for them.’’

Empathy. That is what explains a great deal about Mitt Romney. He lacks empathy. People have been saying that he can’t relate to the common person and he has given many examples. He likes to fire people. A young person who can’t find a job should get his or her parents to give them a loan to start a business. He supports the Ryan budget which raises the defense budget at the expense of the middle class and poor. Plus he certainly was cruel to poor Seamus the dog.

In the Massachusetts Governor’s Office

The President and Gay Marriage

The commentators are in full flower. “This is a great move.” “It is risky.” “This could cost him the election.” What does it really mean? We won’t know until the election in November, but we can try to bring some clarity to some of the noise.

Photograph by Pete Souza

We know that many of those who oppose gay marriage for religious or other grounds will never be convinced, but I expect that some will come around to saying something like “I personally don’t support gay marriage, but as a matter of rights, people should be able to choose.” Kind of like what many Democrats have said about abortion. But the majority of the opposition will remain opposed.

Some will say this was a cynical move on the part of the President to solidify his gay and lesbian supporter. I don’t think so. Richard Socarides wrote in the New Yorker

For a long time, Democrats have taken the gay vote for granted. Political consultants tell Democrats that gay and lesbian voters have nowhere else to go, and thus, in effect, can be counted on, so long as politicians pay lip service to the issue. But that is old thinking, out of touch with the new reality of the gay-rights movement. While I know that most gays and lesbians would have supported President Obama, both with their votes and with their financial contributions, no matter what he did on the issue of marriage equality, we were also not going to take “no” for an answer on the most important civil-rights issue of our day. That meant holding the President’s feet to the fire—first on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and then on marriage equality.

What we do know is that this was an act of courage and leadership. President Obama may be part of the tide rising toward marriage equality, but he is part of the leading edge. Andrew Sullivan

I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn’t know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes.

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The interview changes no laws; it has no tangible effect. But it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House. Obama’s journey on this has been like that of many other Americans, when faced with the actual reality of gay lives and gay relationships. Yes, there was politics in a lot of it. But not all of it. I was in the room long before the 2008 primaries when Obama spoke to the mother of a gay son about marriage equality. He said he was for equality, but not marriage. Five years later, he sees – as we all see – that you cannot have one without the other. But even then, you knew he saw that woman’s son as his equal as a citizen. It was a moment – way off the record at the time – that clinched my support for him.

Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That’s why we elected him. That’s the change we believed in. The contrast with a candidate who wants to abolish all rights for gay couples by amending the federal constitution, and who has donated to organizations that seek to “cure” gays, who bowed to pressure from bigots who demanded the head of a spokesman on foreign policy solely because he was gay: how much starker can it get?

Both Sullivan and Socarides do believe that in the long run, this will not hurt Obama’s reelection chances. Sullivan first

My view politically is that this will help Obama. He will be looking to the future generations as his opponent panders to the past. The clearer the choice this year the likelier his victory. And after the darkness of last night, this feels like a widening dawn.

Then Socarides

This is not to take anything away from the courage exhibited by President Obama today. His willingness to share with the American people his thinking, indeed, his struggle around this issue will help build a national consensus. Everyone is entitled to a journey on this issue.

I suspect that at the end of this national conversation the result will be a good one, and the process, including Obama’s painstakingly slow evolution, will have been a positive experience for the country. Hopefully, it will lead us in a positive direction—which, after all, is the job of a President.

This is a conversation that is just beginning and we owe the President a conversation that is at once passionate and reasoned. Let me end with this from him

This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president, and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a dad and a husband and, hopefully, the better I’ll be as president.

April 22, 2012 by mhasegawa

Fear of polls

It doesn’t matter whether you support Romney or Obama. When a new poll is released you start to parse it. Who did the poll? Are they a Democratic or Republican leaning pollster? How is it different from the last poll you saw? What do the pundits say? Does the result make me happy or anxious?

This morning RealClear Politics had these numbers:

Average: Obama +3.2

Electoral College: Obama 227 Romney 170 (270 needed to win)

Intrade: Obama 60.4 Romeny 38.2

Nate Silver, my poll guru, had some advice the other day. If you are a political junkie, read the whole article, but here are some of the highlights for me.

1. Be patient. Many of the poll-watching habits you learned for the primaries you will need to unlearn for the general election.

In the primaries, it is often worth paying a tremendous amount of attention to how recently a poll was conducted. Because voter opinion shifts rapidly in primaries, a poll that is even two or three days old might have substantially less information value than one that was released today.

That just isn’t true in the general election, when there are fewer swing voters, the candidates are better known, and voter preferences are more rigid. Instead, polls have a much stronger tendency to revert to the mean, and what is perceived to be “momentum” is often just statistical noise. In October, it might be worth sweating just a little bit if there seems to be a two- or three-percentage point shift against your preferred candidate. Right now, it probably isn’t; a poll released on April 20 isn’t going to be much better in the long-run than one released on April 10.

2. Take the poll average. This ought to be obvious, but you should generally be looking for a trend to show up in several different polls from several different polling firms before you start to view it as newsworthy.

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5. Pay attention to likely voters versus registered voters. It is worth looking at whether the poll is conducted among registered voters, likely voters or all adults.

In the past eight presidential election cycles or so, the Republican candidate has done a net of about two percentage points better on average in likely voter polls than in registered voter polls.

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6. Keep paying attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings. In the early stages of general election campaigns, a president’s approval ratings have often been at least as accurate a guide to his eventual performance as the head-to-head numbers. Thus, for at least the next couple of months, I would pay as much attention to Mr. Obama’s approval ratings as his head-to-head polls against Mr. Romney.

It is probably slightly better to look at Mr. Obama’s net approval rating — his approval less his disapproval — than the approval rating alone.

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11. Read the polls in the context of the news. Polls don’t just shift on their own; they change because people are reacting to changes in their circumstances and to different news events.

Political reporters have beats and deadlines and need to turn stories around every day. But most of the day-to-day squabbles that the campaigns have don’t matter to most voters. If there is a shift in the polls, it is much more likely to be real rather than illusory if it follows something like an Israeli air strike on Iran or a stock market crash than something like this or this.

The other caution is that even when major news events do shift the polls, they sometimes have a half-life with the effects fading over time. These events may produce long-term and permanent effects on how voters see the candidates, but they often overshoot the mark in the close term. Recent examples include the uptrend in Mr. Obama’s approval ratings after the death of Osama bin Laden or the downtrend following the debt ceiling negotiations, both of which persisted for some weeks but then faded.

My conclusion: This is going to be close election. Closer than in my opinion it should be.

April 12, 2012 by mhasegawa

Paying a Fair Share or the Buffett Rule

I’ve gotten several email recently from the President, from Elizabeth Warren and from other progressive organizations about the Senate vote on the Buffett rule. Since I’m pretty sure that Senator John Kerry will vote for the bill and Senator Scott Brown will vote against it, I haven’t called, emailed or written either of them about it.

I have, however, wondered what the bill actually does. So thank you to Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in the Washington Post this morning for his explanation. The big vote everyone is talking about is actually a bill introduced by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island. He explained the bill to Ezra who explains it to us.

In other words: The “Paying a Fair Share Act” doesn’t mean someone making $1,500,000 will pay at least the same percentage of his income in taxes as the average middle-class family. It means he would pay a somewhat higher marginal rate on the income he earns over $1 million — in this case, on the excess $500,000.

Moreover, that higher marginal rate would only reach 30 percent on income over $2 million. Between $1 million and $2 million, the Buffett rule phases in so as to avoid a sharp “tax cliff” at the million-dollar mark.

But would it still raise money to help ease the deficit?

Another misconception: The proposal doesn’t raise $47 billion over 10 years. Or, rather, it does, but only if you use the “current law baseline” that assumes the full expiration of the Bush tax cuts. No one really uses that baseline. If you look at Paul Ryan’s budget, for instance, its appendix tables use a “current policy baseline,” which assumes, among other things, that the Bush tax cuts are extended.

Compared with that baseline, the Paying a Fair Share Act actually raises about $160 billion. Still not enough to solve our deficit problems on its own, but nothing to sneeze at.

So as usual it is a little more complicated than the President makes it sound, but still a good thing to support.

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